


Bring It Back, Bring It Back...

by emquin



Series: Endgame fics [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), avengers endgame - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Endgame, Endgame fix it, F/M, Grief, M/M, Stony - Freeform, alternate time line, canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-31 13:55:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20116180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emquin/pseuds/emquin
Summary: This is the result of Stony feels while listening to Love Of My Life by Queen and also after seeing that Endgame deleted scene.





	Bring It Back, Bring It Back...

He falls to his knees and it feels like the shock is going right through his body from where his kneecaps hit the ground right to where his heart is constricting and breaking. His eyes are flooded with tears and he knows that around him the others feel it too. Pepper is breaking down right in front of her husband and the kid -- Peter -- is just behind her. And Tony...Tony is completely still. The stones are still shining on the gauntlet of his suit and but up his arm right to his neck he is charred, dark lines that mar his skin. 

The world. No, the Universe has been saved. Thanos is gone. Everyone is safe and returned and yet--

Rhodey is the one to pull Pepper back and it seems like a sign for the rest of them to move. Carol reaches Tony first. 

The next few minutes...hours...they’re a blur. Too much is happening and at the same time not much at all. If asked later, Steve probably wouldn’t know what happened or how he ended up with a few of the others back at Tony and Pepper’s cabin. 

Vision was gone. Natasha was gone. And now it was Tony…

“Steve?” 

“Steve?”

“Steve?”

“Stevie?”

Bucky came to him. Him and Sam and Steve knew that he should have been happy to see them -- he hadn’t seen them in five years -- but instead his mind was on Tony. 

Tony had known time travel was dangerous. He’d known that something might happen...and then it had. Thanos from the past -- one willing to destroy not just half of everything but everything. 

“Stevie?” 

“I -- it’s over,” Steve said. 

Bucky nodded. Steve closed his eyes and he took a breath and he knew he couldn’t fall apart. He couldn’t because he was supposed to be Captain America. He was Steve Rogers. He and Tony had barely even been friends most of the time and the other-- 

He couldn’t afford to fall apart. Not when Pepper was his wife and when Tony had a daughter. Not to mention the kid and Rhodey...even Natasha had been more of a friend to him in the end. 

“What needs to be done...how can I help?” Steve asked. 

Bucky clapped him on the back. 

They were on good terms in the end. Steve had trusted him and followed his lead with the time travel -- even when it had meant making that risky move and going to 1970. Steve just wished that things had been like that earlier. Hindsight was twenty twenty and all. 

The funeral was a few days later. 

Pepper held herself together, she was strong and emotional, but with a poise that Steve admired. Morgan stuck close to her mother. 

Tony left a message, because of course he did. Even in death he was ten steps ahead of everyone else. 

It was only later that he saw Pepper let it all out. He and a few others were staying at her house for the time being and Steve wasn’t entirely sure that she was happy with house guests. He found her in the middle of the night in the living room. A picture of Tony was in one hand and in the other a bottle of tequila. 

“Ms. Potts?”

She didn’t turn at once, but when she did, he could see the tears and the running mascara. 

“Captain, I--”

“You don’t need to explain. You lost your husband -- the father of your daughter…”

Steve couldn’t sleep. He was still in that moment when it all stopped and Tony was gone. Sometimes he thought about the day he first saw the cottage and how adamantly Tony had told them their idea wouldn’t work. Tony had looked good. At peace. Happy, maybe, in spite of everything. 

“Captain,” she said. 

“Steve. Call me Steve.”

She nodded and patted her cheeks with a tissue. “Is there anything I can do for you, Steve?”

Steve shook his head. “No. I couldn’t sleep. I was going to go for a run.”

“It’s hard,” Pepper said. “Even knowing that it was a possibility -- even knowing that he saved us all. But, it would have been worse if he did nothing. He considered it, you know, once he figured it out. It would have driven him crazy and I would have felt guilty too. Tony gave me everything -- he gave me Morgan. And, I -- he gave himself to save us all.”

Steve didn’t know how to reply. 

“He shouldn’t have had to,” Steve said eventually. 

Pepper cleared her throat. “But he did. The only thing we can do now is move forward.”

Move forward. Let go. Keep living. Sentiments that Steve really had no business figuring out how to do. 

“I’ve never been good at that,” Steve said. 

Pepper didn’t say anything for a while, but then her eyes -- rimmed red -- met his. “Want to know a secret?”

She didn’t wait for him to respond. 

“He wasn’t happy. Not really.”

“But he had you and Morgan and--”

Pepper chuckled. “We weren’t enough. He loved me. He loved Morgan too. Of course he did, but then Tony loved us all and he wanted his family back and that was Peter and you. Maybe especially you.”

Steve stared at her in surprise. “But I was just...I was here and he never--”

Pepper’s eyes were filling up with tears again. “You broke his heart, Steve,” she whispered.

Steve gasped. In his mind he could picture Tony freshly returned from space looking gaunt and destroyed. He remembered Tony shoving the nanotech housing unit into his hand, the device breaking apart and in that moment all he’d been able to see was Siberia and Tony in the Iron Man armor and his shield shoved into the arc reactor right over Tony’s chest. 

“I know,” Steve whispered. 

“And yet he kept loving you anyway,” Pepper said. She said it just above a whisper, but he heard and she knew he heard. 

“I’m -- I, um, I should go on my run now.”

He and Tony fought all the time, arguments that escalated quickly and that neither wanted to back down from. Steve admired Tony’s conviction even if he often thought that Tony’s approach was wrong. Maybe not wrong. Different. But what happened in Siberia...that should never have happened at all and maybe if it hadn’t then -- but thinking in what ifs didn’t make anything better. 

He ran and ran and ran and ran and just kept running. The days bled together. He ran. Morgan looked at him with a question in her eyes, head tilted just so -- she looked just like her father. It was hard to take her in sometimes and see Tony’s eyes staring back at him. 

Pepper didn’t seem to mind that they were all hanging around her house. It was just until the new Avengers facility was built and while Bruce built a new time machine. Steve thought that Pepper actually preferred them all there -- they kept her from being in a house alone with just Morgan and reminders of Tony everywhere. They kept her busy and engaged even if she never talked to him about Tony again. 

Steve had no memories of Tony in that house -- at least none that mattered. He remembered him at the tower and at the compound and at Clint’s farm. He remembered him on the quinjet and in the sky flying away. He remembered him in the workshop, bent over a new project, and he remembered him perfectly on the rare times when they were together. Tony’s eyes hazed with pleasure, his smiles genuine and sated and perfect. He remembered the rare morning when the light hit his face just so and he blinked awake smiling. Happy. 

He started drawing. At first it was just the nature around him. Tony’s alpaca -- Gerald. Some of his chickens. The cabin. The lake. The chickens again. 

Morgan watched him draw and he started teaching her. Then, he drew her and one sleepless night he started drawing Tony. Tony on his own in and out of the suit and then Tony with Morgan. Tony with Spider-Man. Tony with the team. Tony and Pepper. And hidden away for his eyes only -- him and Tony. 

“That’s daddy,” Morgan said when she saw one. 

Steve gave her the one of Tony and her. “Yeah, kid, and that’s you and your dad.” 

“I miss him.” 

“Me too.”

Three weeks passed before Bruce had the time machine ready. Steve felt like no time at all had passed -- it was all fresh in his mind. 

“You doing okay, Steve?” Bucky asked. 

“Want me to come with you, man?” Sam asked. 

“Yeah, I’m doing okay,” Steve said and he shrugged Sam off. 

Then he was holding the stones and Thor’s hammer. He couldn’t get himself to let anyone accompany him. The last time, he’d been with Tony through it all -- and it was Tony that he wanted with him again. 

Before he left the cabin, Pepper had hugged him tightly, misty eyed and continually strong as ever. 

“Do whatever you need to do, Steve. You have my blessing -- not that you need it,” she whispered, holding his hand tight in her own. 

“Pepper, I--”

She smiled, then, knowing and secretive all at once and when she hugged him again she whispered in his ear.

Morgan hugged him too, showed him her newest masterpiece. It was Iron Man and a smaller Iron Man armor. 

“It’s me,” she said. “Like daddy.” 

“You sure are just like your father,” Steve said and he kissed her cheek to her giggling delight.

He told Bucky. He owed him that much after everything. 

He left in the blink of an eye -- and from one place and time to the next returning what they took. The scepter, Steve left for last, not sure if he could do it or not. 

_ He loved you. So, love him. Make him happy. Please. You’re the love of his life. And he is yours. _

Pepper’s words were in his head, a surprise and a wish and everything he wanted. It shouldn’t have surprised him to hear the words from her or to realize that she accepted it and had known all along and that she seemingly held no grudges.

It was a little bit selfish, but then love needed to be. 

Tony looked young and vibrant and he was  _ alive _ . He was a second chance. Things were going to be different. Better. He was the love of his life. Pepper was right. 

_ Love of my life, you've hurt me _

_ You've broken my heart _

_ And now you leave me _

_ Love of my life, can't you see? _

_ Bring it back, bring it back _

_ Don't take it away from me _

_ Because you don't know _

_ What it means to me _

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Love Of My Life by Queen is an amazing ballad and an amazingly beautiful and sad song all at once and it feels so fitting for Steve and Tony and everyone should go and have a listen to it. It partly inspired this fic...but really I wanted to write something begining with Steve dropping to his knees after Tony's death. 
> 
> Thanks for reading. 
> 
> If you liked it come like/reblog it on [tumblr](https://inawickedlittletown.tumblr.com/post/186781171652/bring-it-back-bring-it-back-one-shot)


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